2021 Will Be a Make-or-Break Year for Multilateralism

Joshua Lincoln 

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At the end of a tumultuous and disorienting year for the international community, it seems only fair to take stock of where we stand. The answer is clear: We are between storms.

COVID-19 and climate change—the first a dramatic gale whipping the globe, the second a far deadlier gathering hurricane—have brought fresh urgency to international cooperation. The first injections of coronavirus vaccines have brought hope that the pandemic can be defeated soon, though we are far from out of the woods. Meanwhile, with the United Nations gearing up to take a bolder leadership role, a new U.S. president pledging a return to diplomacy, and the crucial next U.N. climate summit set to take place next November in Glasgow, 2021 is shaping up to be the most significant year for multilateralism in recent memory.

‘Very difficult to defend’: What happens if hackers are inside the Pentagon’s networks?

Andrew Eversden , Joe Gould , and Mark Pomerleau

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WASHINGTON — If Russian hackers suspected of a vast cybersecurity breach slipped into the Pentagon or military’s computer systems, the strength of protective network blockades is key to keeping them from burrowing in to try to access increasing amounts of information.

Those protections — in the form of secure network connections — have to stand up to meddling to keep hackers from hopping from network to network to potentially reach sensitive communications or even weapon systems, where they could steal or alter data or cause damage, experts say. However, observers point out that this breach appears so far to be a classic espionage campaign, though with some of the most sophisticated methods seen yet.

“We certainly have a high degree of activity around that right now,” Navy CIO Aaron Weis told C4ISRNET. “We have teams who have acted upon the direct orders from Cyber Command and have executed those things. We continue to engage around that. There are internal meetings that are ongoing where we’re ensuring that we’ve put the right things in place. Absolutely it’s got our full attention.”

Overall, the Pentagon has been largely silent about the breach publicly as it works through the long process to assess fallout from the intrusion, saying early on that no breach had been detected yet, despite media reports that said the agency was among government offices compromised through widely used software from SolarWinds, a network management company.

Why America must retaliate after massive cyberattack from Russia

BY DOUGLAS SCHOEN

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American government agencies and private companies were victims of an espionage attack last week. Security experts have said the hacker group Cozy Bear, managed by the Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia, was responsible. The scope of the breach is considerable and could be the largest spying operation in history against the United States.

It exposes flaws in our intelligence system as numerous federal agencies were targeted, including the Homeland Security Department. This attack by Russia marks a clear existential threat to the United States. The breach needs to be taken as a potential act of war against the United States and necessitates a certain and swift retaliation from the government.

But the action by President Trump has been neither swift nor certain. He has taken a similar regretful posture toward this breach as he has toward other cases of aggression from Russia. Despite the mounting evidence of responsibility, Trump has undercut those assertions by security experts, and even by his own administration officials, that Russia was behind this. Trump also made a baseless assertion that China held responsibility and falsely said the attack affected voting machines in the election.

Joe Biden has already indicated that he will take decisive action against Russia after taking office and work with our allies to counter the threat of its aggression in a way that Trump has mostly failed to do. Biden declared the United States needs to work “with our allies to set up an international system that will constitute appropriate behavior in cyberspace” and “hold any other country liable for breaking out of those basic rules.”

Can Joe Biden Really Overcome America’s Divisions?

by Robert W. Merry

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THE MOST pressing imperative facing the incoming president, Joe Biden, is to pacify the ongoing and increasingly tense civil conflict between America’s coastal elites, who are liberal and globalist in outlook, and the nationalist/traditionalist folks of the heartland, who feel beleaguered by those elites. In order to do this, he will have to build a governing coalition that starts with a large segment of his Democratic base but also seeks to draw in more moderate elements of the opposition. If he tries to govern strictly from the Left, as his party will want, the civil conflict will continue and deepen, Biden’s government will seize up, and he will fail.

Donald Trump’s strong popular-vote showing, along with the outcomes in congressional balloting and state-legislative races, makes clear that American politics continues to reside on a knife’s edge of political parity and mutual hostility. There will be no wave of popular support of the kind that Franklin Roosevelt could summon after his strong 1932 election, or that Ronald Reagan commanded after 1980. If Biden is to succeed he must generate his own wave through the delicate art of governing.

Will he do it? Not clear. Can he succeed even if he tries to do it? Less clear. The president-elect’s party, still traumatized by the very emergence of Trump, will want Biden to govern as if the incumbent’s defeat on November 3 places the country back where it was before the vulgar billionaire crashed the political scene four years ago. That would mean policies and pronouncements denoting the party’s continuing view of Trump supporters as “deplorables.”

Biden Should Pursue a Trump 2.0 Foreign Policy

by John O'Sullivan

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IF COUNTRIES in the mostly free world don’t respond warmly to whatever U.S. foreign policy Joe Biden offers them, they will be showing gross ingratitude, since ending the unpredictable and impolite oscillations of Trump's foreign policy has been the constant theme of their complaints for the last four years. Biden should be able to manage that easily enough, as he’ll be surrounded by people with advanced Ivy League degrees in making things run smoothly.

In addition, the points in his manifesto that reflect Democratic talking points and the interests of supportive NGOs—for instance, new arms control treaties, toughening global rules on gender violence, liberalizing migration rules for Muslim majority countries—will be popular with the countries concerned, alienate only Republican voters, and give him favorable headlines in The New York Times. He is already on the same page as European Union leaders in Berlin, Paris, and Brussels in wanting “More Europe” policies such as an integrated European defense policy and the rubber-stamping of ambitious financial packages designed to save Europe from both the coronavirus and the endless Euro crisis. And, finally, Biden would win any competition in not being Donald Trump. He is more unlike Donald Trump than any other Democrat except perhaps for those who apparently voted from their graves in Milwaukee. And that’s a foreign policy in itself.

At the same time, Biden takes office at the moment when it’s increasingly respectable to point out that many of Trump’s innovations in foreign policy now look necessary and sensible. Some will say Trump’s obnoxious behavior is to blame for the resistance of America’s allies to seeing the virtues in those policies. But how successful were the many presidents who asked NATO’s European members to increase their defense spending in politely diplomatic terms? It took noisy table-thumping from Trump to change some minds. Come to that, has Angela Merkel’s Germany yet learned the obligations of alliance solidarity either towards Russia over Nord Stream Two or towards China on a range of topics from Huawei to its imprisonment of Uighur Muslims? Germany’s political culture, which is a sort of commercial pacifism heavily scented with anti-Americanism, is a problem for America mainly, but also for those European countries which are perpetually nervous of a Russo-German partnership that would decide key issues “Rapallo-style.”

Here's How the Pandemic Could Play Out in 2021

by Adam Kleczkowski

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Vaccines for COVID-19 are now being rolled out, but in some parts of the world, this good news has been tempered by the emergence of new, potentially more infectious strains of the virus. Exactly how the pandemic will evolve has become more uncertain.

Certainly, the next three or so months will be challenging, and a virus-free life is probably some way off. Some things may not return to how they were before.

Predicting exactly how things will play out is difficult, but there are some things we can forecast with a relative degree of confidence. With that in mind, here’s what we can expect from the coming year.

What impact will the new strain have?

There’s currently only limited information about the new viral strain. Although yet to be confirmed, it appears to be more infectious, but not to lead to more severe disease or be able to evade vaccine-derived immunity.

However, the variant suggests the virus is able to produce significant mutations, and further mutations could change the course of the outbreak. Suppressing the pandemic quickly therefore has become an even more urgent task.

Stricter restrictions on behaviour are likely to last well into the new year, and we may need further restrictions to control the virus if it is indeed more infectious.

How long until we see the vaccine’s effects?

In Search of British Exceptionalism Post-Brexit

Srdjan Vucetic

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“We are no longer a great power. We will never be so again,” declared Sir John Major on November 9, 2020 at Middle Temple in London. An outspoken critic of Brexit – the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union – the former Conservative prime minister warned of a “brutal” future, which he blamed on the negotiating “failures” of the Conservative government of Boris Johnson: “Because of our bombast, our blustering, our threats and our inflexibility – our trade will be less profitable, our Treasury poorer, our jobs fewer, and our future less prosperous.” Furthermore, Brexit increased the “risk of breaking up the UK by increased support for Scotland to leave the Union, and Northern Ireland to unite with the South.” But rather than ending on a wholly pessimistic note, Major proposed a foreign policy recalibration. “Global Britain” – a policy (slogan) introduced by Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May – was a good idea, assuming, he said, “we” forswear the fantasy of “British exceptionalism.”

What is this fantasy about, and where does it come from? According to scholars such as Oliver Daddow, British exceptionalism emerged at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when Britain’s elites opted for a policy of “limited liability” to Europe as a means of freeing up resources for empire-building and free trade. To garner support for this policy, they constructed and sustained various “island stories.” Their moral, however, was always the same: “we” are not, and could not possibly be, “just” another European nation. Some members of said elite were in fact rather specific: not “a Spain” (Sir Oswald Mosely, at various points in the interwar period), not “another Netherlands” (Harold Macmillan, speaking as Chancellor of the Exchequer during the Suez Crisis), not “another Belgium” (more than a few politicians, from Lord Curzon in 1908 to the current era), and not “sort of poor man’s Sweden” (the governor of Aden Sir Charles Johnston in 1963). The exception to prove the rule was France, of course so long as it managed to sustain its great power bona fides. Here is Sir Malcolm Rifkind, writing in 2010: “The question for the UK and its Conservative led Government is whether it wishes to retain a global approach, or resign itself to the lesser status. Is it still prepared to act like France, or is it content to have influence comparable with that of Spain?”

How Nazi Germany Invented the Blitzkrieg (And Conquered Europe)

by Warfare History Network

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The attack was beginning despite the widespread lack of artillery support, engineers, or armor. Normally this would be a recipe for disaster. Clusters of gray-clad German infantrymen braved the torrent of enemy fire, carrying assault boats right up to edge of the Meuse River. On the opposite bank, French soldiers crouched in their bunkers and trenches as German aircraft roared overhead, bombing and strafing, paying particular attention to the French artillery positions within range of the river. The Luftwaffe pilots were determined to keep French heads down with a storm of bombs and bullets. Men on both sides braved fire to accomplish their respective missions on the afternoon of May 13, 1940.

This first appeared earlier and is being reposted due to reader interest.

On the German side of the river, Lt. Col. Hermann Balck urged his men forward. His command, Panzergrenadier Regiment 1 of the 1st Panzer Division, was tasked to get across the river and establish a bridgehead. The situation was already unfolding against his unit. Earlier in the day, the least German movement drew artillery fire, keeping the German troops pinned in their hastily dug foxholes and entrenchments. Their own artillery was hopelessly mired in a traffic jam rearward and could not get there in time. The boats for the crossing had arrived, but the operators had not. The only thing that had gone right was the Luftwaffe’s air attack. The aviators’ efforts had been so successful the French gunners had reportedly abandoned their guns and refused to return to them.

The Perils of Forecasting

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In 2004, Harvard Professor Samuel P. Huntington published his last book, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity. The book received virtually all bad, in some cases scathing, reviews. Its broad theme was that the continued rise of Mexican immigration, legal and illegal, into the United States, coupled with the ascent of multiculturalism—even while America’s policy elites were turning away from America and becoming more cosmopolitan and global—augured for an epic internal crisis in America. Huntington was startling clairvoyant, of course: foreseeing the battle lines of Donald Trump’s presidency. But 16 years ago, because many of those trends were relatively undeveloped, the book was considered simply alarmist. Because the book’s reviewers were members of the same global elite that the author was criticizing, they were particularly incensed. 

The book was not a publishing success. By the time Huntington’s themes did achieve a heightened reality, he was dead. Huntington was true to his calling right up to the end of his life. As he once told me, the job of a political scientist is not to improve the world, but to say what he or she thinks is going on in it. There is a disturbing lesson here. Outside of the intelligence and business communities, which actively appreciate hard-nosed, non-linear thinking in the Huntington manner, being too far ahead of the curve can be problematic to an academic or journalistic career. For even the most clairvoyant theory can be only, say, 80 percent accurate, and colleagues inevitably will concentrate on the 20 percent that is wrong. That is how reputations suffer. And precisely because the pathologies that the theorist has described are only in their early stages at the time of his or her writing, they lack an obvious context, so that the audience reacts with offense or sheer disbelief (or both) to his work.

AIMING FOR ROBUST CYBERSECURITY: TOP 7 CYBERSECURITY PREDICTIONS FOR 2021

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The increase in cyber-attacks has threatened the security of the organizations globally. Regularly six out of ten organizations are encountered with an unprecedented situation of cyberattacks. Despite the robust security measures adopted by organizations, cyberattacks have increasingly permeated across the industry. A report by Accenture titled, “Innovate for Cyber Resilience” states that most organizations spend 10.9% of their IT budgets on cybersecurity programs. Despite this on an average, organizations are faced by 27% of security breaches every year, with 11% involving direct attacks. As per a report by IBM the average total cost of a data breach accounts to US$ 3.86 million.

The United States of America is listed amongst the country bearing the maximum cost of US$8.64 million with such data breach and cyberattacks, whereas healthcare is counted as the most expensive industry with an average loss of US$ 7.13 million every year. The average time required for identifying and containing a data breach is 280 days. This implies that most organizations do not have sufficient amount of inputs for preliminary detection of cyberattacks.

Since the year 2020 has been the most straining across organizations, the incidents of cyberattacks, security breach and data breach has also manifolded. Owing to the COVID 19, as organizations shifted to remote working, they are rendered to face an increase in cyberattacks and data breaches. Reports suggest that the cyberattacks, including ransomware and malware, have expedited by more than 200 billion this year. A Verizon report points out that 71% of security breaches are financially motivated, whereas 25% takes place with a motivation of espionage. The 52% breaches feature hacking, 28% involves malware, whereas 32-33% are performed through phishing and social engineering. In 2019, the global average cost of the data breach was recorded to be US$3.92 million.

Kamikaze Drones: The Future of Undersea Warfare?

by Robert Farley 

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Imagine a future in which nuclear attack submarines (SSNs) can deploy undersea drones (UUVs) to hunt, and possibly kill, enemy subs. The U.S. Navy, at least, is taking steps to make this a reality. What impact could this have? On the one hand, UUVs could shake modern antisubmarine warfare (ASW) to its core, making existing platforms vulnerable or obsolete. On the other hand, the development of UUVs could reinforce existing hierarchies; in contrast to popular understanding, established organizations are often the best at adapting to disruptive military innovations. The future of the U.S. Navy depends to great extent of which of these becomes a reality.

History

In a sense, submarine launched drones have existed for quite some time; even in World War II, navies used pattern following or acoustic homing in order to find their targets. Wire guided torpedoes were introduced in the 1960s, allowing the submarine a measure of control over how the weapon approached its target. These torpedoes are suicidal drones in the same sense as cruise missiles; weapons that can be launched, then directed to their target either through autonomous mechanisms or by user interface.

THE TACTICAL APPLICATION OF OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE (OSINT)

By PTE E

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In the rapidly evolving digital age, the organisations responsible for the defence and security of the western world face growing and ever changing threats. Our likely adversaries have mastered the use of social media and its wider platforms to advance their goals.[1] In contemporary warfare, actors carry out significant actions in the information domain. ISIL in Iraq and Syria used social media to recruit, target, finance and even orchestrate attacks with deadly effect. [2] In the Ukrainian conflict, Russian operatives took advantage of operational security breaches to exploit and target Ukrainian military personnel.[3] Our threat grows in size and sophistication across cyber space. This once linear threat has become more fluid, with the ability to move through physical barriers, across borders and influence any target with relative ease and little cost.

Opportunities

We live in a fast moving, highly connected, digitised world, where almost everyone has access to endless amounts of information accessible from anywhere as long as there is an internet connection. Smartphones are one the biggest contributors to data collection and dissemination on social media through the upload and sharing of images, video, opinions and personal content. 41% percent of the world’s population have access to smart phones[4], with a new generation of young people now reliant on technology more than ever there were more than 3.1 billion social media users recorded in 2018 able to log and update their lives instantaneously. In the Middle East eight in ten (79%) people check in to social media at least once per day and seven in ten (69%) use social media more frequently - checking in multiple times per day, sharing media and making public comments. [5]

We often share more publicly through social media than we would be comfortable sharing with a colleague in conversation. As the percentage of people using smartphones and social media increases so does the information base, potentially allowing immediate access to photographs, video or comments in areas of interest around the globe. Although the intent is benign, this now public information can be used for security and intelligence purposes. For example, an image posted publicly of a city street, provides a date stamped snapshot of road conditions, pattern of life, urban density, infrastructure, stakeholder activity, specific environmental factors and even insight into threat groups. This raw data can then be reviewed, analysed and distilled into intelligence products for use by the tactical commander.

Vulnerabilities

The sound of history: Let's put on our work boots and engage the world

BY WILLIAM C. DANVERS

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Washington is burning, the nation is divided, and some are still fighting over a settled presidential election, ignoring the real crises confronting the U.S. and the international community. The pandemic has changed the world in ways we have yet to understand. Nonetheless, existing problems must be confronted, albeit in a pandemic-altered environment.

Here are a few of the existential problems facing the Biden administration as it prepares to take office in January:

The pandemic will be the primary focus of the new administration. Resources, financial and human, will be issue No. 1 domestically and globally. Some estimates predict global GDP will decrease by 4.5 percent in 2020. The World Bank estimates that the global extreme poverty rate could be as high as 9.4 percent of the world’s population by the end of 2020, and the World Food Program has indicated that as many as an additional 130 million people could be pushed to the point of starvation as a result of the pandemic. These issues will impact everything from trade to a burgeoning refugee problem, to a rise in autocratic governments taking advantage of the complications the pandemic has created for governing.

A MILITARY HISTORY OF POLITICAL WARS

Paul Barnes

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As a single-volume history of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ben Barry’s Blood, Metal and Dust is currently unrivaled; its analysis of Western military capability, organizational transformation, and doctrinal development since 9/11 is simply exceptional. But in attempting to tell the story of those campaigns in just one volume, Barry seeks to do the impossible; that he produces such a readable and informative book is testament to his ability as an analyst and writer.

Like the wars themselves, Blood, Metal and Dust is incomplete in chronology and content; it lacks both the perspective of the West’s opponents and access to unreleased and as yet confidential primary sources. Furthermore, the character of the book leads Barry to make conclusions that remain matters of conjecture. For example, his assessment of Iranian strategy throughout the period in question concludes that it has been successful; this may appear compelling through the lens of 2020, but as an ongoing project, that strategy may look far less impressive with greater hindsight.

Barry’s overarching narrative is one of capable, innovative, and adaptable militaries ultimately failed by poor political judgment and weak strategy. Superficially, particularly for those of us who fought in these campaigns, this is a comforting perspective, but at a deeper level it is rather troubling. To be sure, politicians on both sides of the Atlantic failed dismally, but so did soldiers. The parallels with the mythology of the Vietnam War are abundantly clear: the book suggests that military lessons were learned coherently and that the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq could have been fought to a successful military conclusion if only politicians had listened to the accumulated wisdom of soldiers.

The Army is Interested in an Electric, Unmanned Combat Vehicle

by Caleb Larson

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Here's What You Need to Remember: Change is coming for ground troops, and if the technical hurdles inherent to all-electric vehicle technology—namely range and recharge times—can be overcome, robot combat vehicles could become the silent killers of the future.

Textron Systems is the aerospace and defense manufacturing firm responsible for developing a wide range of vehicles and weapon systems including the U.S. Navy’s Landing Craft Air Cushions. The company is also a contender for the Army’s Next Generation Squad Weapon competition and has been developing yet another interesting platform.

Their Ripsaw M5 is an unmanned, multi-mission Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) that has gone through several prototypes and is currently in its fifth-generation. Textron currently manufactures the Ripsaw in two variants, a 7.5 ton light variant, as well as a larger 10.5 medium variant. Both the light and medium variants can be equipped with conventional diesel engines, or with a hybrid electric drivetrain.

Textron touts the Ripsaw as a multi-mission, multi-domain platform, capable of performing a variety of missions, including breaching/mine clearing, reconnaissance and surveillance, as well as direct-action missions. To those ends, it can be equipped with a heavy machine gun remote weapon station, a turret for a medium caliber cannon, or anti-aircraft missiles. Armor, suspension, and drivetrain are modular, and can be customized to mission requirements.

Advantage at Sea: U.S. Maritime Strategy Focuses on China

By Andrew Erickson

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Editor’s Note: We recently spoke with Dr. Andrew Erickson, a professor of strategy in the U.S. Naval War College (NWC)’s China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI), to get his take on the newly released U.S. maritime strategy, Advantage at Sea.

First, give us a sense of your overall assessment of the new maritime strategy, Advantage at Sea. What does it do, why does it matter, and how could it shape future naval strategy for the United States?

The tri-service strategy offers a clear vision of the greatest challenges facing the United States and its vital interests, how the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard can best address them, and the prioritization that will be required to do so. This well-written document is exceptional in its provision of information, substantive analysis, and guidance. It explains how China poses the greatest challenges to American interests of any nation: “the most comprehensive threat to the United States, our allies, and all nations supporting a free and open system.” It explains how America’s Sea Services, front-line witnesses to this sea change, are best placed to address many of those challenges, and why this should be the top priority moving forward.

I could not help but notice the amount of attention is given to China’s maritime militia in the document. Does the new strategy, in your view, pay enough attention to this threat? Do we have the resources needed in the Asia-Pacific considering the size and scope of the threat presented by Beijing in this area?

Chinese Communist Party think tank staffer offered to pay for sources

Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

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A person on LinkedIn claiming to work for a think tank run by a high-ranking Chinese Communist Party department recently offered financial compensation for the names of my sources and for reports about the incoming Biden's administration's views on China.

Why it matters: It was a surprisingly clumsy attempt to gain insider information about the U.S. government's China policy, suggesting that amid a chill in U.S.-China relations and a global pandemic, it's gotten harder for people in Beijing to know what's happening in Washington.

Details: A couple of weeks ago, someone named Aaron Shen (沈岳 in Chinese) sent me a request to connect on LinkedIn. I accepted after I saw he claimed to be the assistant director of international liaison at the China Center for Contemporary World Studies — the in-house think tank of the International Department of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee (IDCPC).

The IDCPC functions as the foreign affairs wing of the party.

The IDCPC's job is "to win support for China among foreign political parties," The Economist's Gady Epstein recently wrote. "As a party outfit it has considerable authority. It works closely with the foreign ministry and swaps personnel with it."

Hints of Chinese Naval Procurement Plans in the 2020s

By Rick Joe

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This year has seen multiple major navies in the world establish their future long term procurement strategies, ranging from the U.S. Navy’s 500-ship plan for its fleet by the year 2045, to the U.K.’s plans for the Royal Navy post-2030, and the Indian Navy’s recent reinforcement for its aspirations for a third aircraft carrier. Indeed, ambitions for expansion appear to be in the cards worldwide for many major navies, both for the near future, and in the longer term beyond 2030 as well, despite the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thus it is somewhat appropriate that in recent weeks rumors emerged surrounding some of the naval procurement goals set as part of China’s recently concluded Fifth Plenum in late October surrounding the 14th Five-Year Plan (to be abbreviated hereafter as 14-FYP), that produces goals and strategy for the entire nation across the next five years from 2021 to 2025. This article will review the details of those rumors (as well as omitted information), in context of some recent predictions written by myself on the subject of future PLA Navy (PLAN) procurement. 

An Impending Slowdown?

Is Amazon the next anti-trust target after Alibaba?

By DAVID P. GOLDMAN

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While Chinese regulators prepare anti-monopoly measures against Internet giant Alibaba, the US House Judiciary Committee made nearly-identical accusations against Amazon.com, the dominant US online retailer and the world’s e-commerce pioneer. Both companies used their dominant market share to force merchants into exclusive deals that shut out competitors, regulators allege.

It’s not often that Chinese and American regulators attack the same problem in the same way, but the economics of Internet retailing raises the same problem in both countries. There’s a fuzzy line between what economists call “natural monopolies” due to the network effect, which gives a major player like Amazon, Facebook or Google huge advantages, and the predatory exercise of monopoly powers to crush competitors. Tech industry regulators around the world find themselves in the same boat, despite radical differences in regulatory systems.

Some Western commentators claim that a power struggle between China’s Communist leadership and entrepreneur Jack Ma, Alibaba’s founder, motivated the anti-monopoly crackdown on Alibaba and other Chinese tech giants. Chinese authorities postponed a planned $36 billion Initial Public Offering for Ma’s Ant Financial in early October after the billionaire clashed publicly with Chinese Vice President Wang Qishan.

[Bookmark] ‘Political Warfare, Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to ‘Win without Fighting”

by Kerry K. Gershaneck

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Kerry K. Gershaneck’s book about Communist China’s efforts over the past seven decades to Political Warfare, Strategies for Combating China’s Plan to Win without Fighting as a whole will go down as a classic on texts about political warfare and how to combat it holistically. 

For readers who do not know what political warfare is, think of it as the use of all forms of pressure—political, economic, diplomatic, cultural, intelligence, military, and paramilitary—that one country exerts on another to do what it wants it to do short of actual prolonged fighting or combat. 

As Gershaneck makes clear, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) uses political warfare 24 hours a day, seven days a week, against every country, especially Japan and the United States, and even against its own people in order to protect its status domestically and promote by whatever means necessary China’s view of its place in the world internationally.

China has both the financial resources and the manpower to engage in political warfare on a global scale the likes of which some people are just now beginning to appreciate. It also clearly has the will. By some estimates, China could employ over 10 million people in its global propaganda and media influence efforts. This may sound excessive, but it is actually a conservative estimate.

The success of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)‘s political warfare can be seen in its ability now to block criticism in the United Nations of its human rights policies, its aggressive voice in its new Wolf Warrior diplomacy, its expansion of the Belt and Road Initiative, its ability to keep Taiwan out of international organizations, including the World Health Organization, and its cover-up of the origins of the Wuhan virus—all the while promoting to the world its own miraculous “success” in containing the virus and quickly rebuilding its economy.

Capitalism After the Pandemic

By Mariana Mazzucato

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After the 2008 financial crisis, governments across the world injected over $3 trillion into the financial system. The goal was to unfreeze credit markets and get the global economy working again. But instead of supporting the real economy—the part that involves the production of actual goods and services—the bulk of the aid ended up in the financial sector. Governments bailed out the big investment banks that had directly contributed to the crisis, and when the economy got going again, it was those companies that reaped the rewards of the recovery. Taxpayers, for their part, were left with a global economy that was just as broken, unequal, and carbon-intensive as before. “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” goes a popular policymaking maxim. But that is exactly what happened.

Now, as countries are reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns, they must avoid making the same mistake. In

China's Propensity for Innovation in the 21st Century

by Steven W. Popper

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Research Questions

How far will China be able to go toward achieving the pathbreaking innovation it seeks broadly across many sectors?

What information would be needed to better understand China's propensity for innovation and thus assess its trajectory in the coming decades?

How well might standard criteria for evaluation used in other technology-leading nations apply to a system affirmatively designed to follow a development path "with Chinese characteristics"?

The authors examine the propensity within China's innovation system to realize its potential as an innovating nation: What is the balance of systemic forces that incline toward seeing that the innovation assets China possesses lead to innovation outcomes? They lay out a conceptual framework for capturing the major activities, interactions, and flows that give rise to technological innovations. They use this framework to place within one matrix salient elements that appear in the global literature on innovation; the literature on innovation in China and on its political, economic, and social systems; the results from three case studies prepared for this report (pharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence, and distributed ledger technology); and three different inquiries into the nature and measurement of network organization. They then provide a determination of which cells in the matrix that result from placing these elements into the innovation framework might be most useful as windows into those aspects of China's innovation system dynamics that might be expected to affect innovation propensity and observed innovation outcomes.

A difficult year looms for the European Union

BY DUNCAN ROBINSON

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INTERNAL FRICTIONS, external worries and some long-anticipated farewells will be the order of the day for the European Union in 2021. A colossal amount of effort went into agreeing to issue €750bn ($888bn) in collective debt for the first time to allay a financial crisis, as covid-19 racked the continent. In 2021 EU politicians will learn that agreeing to borrow the money was the easy bit—agreeing how to spend it will be much harder.

Sceptical countries, such as the Netherlands, will keep a close eye on what governments are doing with the money; Spanish and Italian politicians will not appreciate other EU countries butting into their financial affairs. They will have to get used to it, though. Such debates are normally the purview of purely national politics. In 2021 they will start to take place on a European level.

Boris Johnson has 'got Brexit done'. With a deal that will please no one

Martin Kettle

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Brexit was never fundamentally an economic project. It was always more about what it said on the ballot paper in 2016. Brexit was about ceasing to be a member of the European Union. Leavers understood that. Remainers, in contrast, still struggle with it. To a lot of remainers, Brexit had to be a proxy for something else: anti-immigrant feeling, maybe, economic disempowerment, or post-imperial nostalgia. Those issues were not irrelevant to Brexit, but they were never the main point.

Leaving the EU was an emotionally charged political proposition, not an economic one. It was a desire rooted in a vision of British sovereignty richly marinaded in a heady mix of nostalgia and bogus victimhood, fanned by Britain’s media, and which made the enormous error of confusing sovereignty with power. The reality of that error will come home to roost in the months and years ahead. But Brexit was never about the price of potatoes or cars. In the end, it wasn’t even about standing up for Britain’s one genuine shared diplomatic triumph of recent decades, the Northern Ireland peace agreement.

The initial hoopla on Christmas Eve about the trade deal with the EU must be seen from that perspective. Stupid headlines about a Merry Brexmas conceal the fact that what is being celebrated is in fact a thin deal and bad economic news for Britain. But economics has always been secondary in Brexit. Trade deals, like economic arrangements more generally, are not Brexit’s first-order objectives but its second-order consequences. If free trade had been the objective, Britain would have stayed in the single market and the customs union. It was nonsense for Boris Johnson to pretend on Thursday that the EU deal will create “a giant free-trade zone”. There was one there already. And this deal says little about services.

Europe After the Pandemic

By Antonia Colibasanu

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Editor’s note: The following analysis is adapted from the forthcoming book, “Contemporary Geopolitics and Geoeconomics.”

For the European Union, two events were supposed to define 2020: Brexit and the looming 2021-27 budget, which includes the so-called Green Deal. As the new leadership in Brussels announced at the beginning of the year, these developments would set the course for a new “geopolitical” European Union. They would make the bloc stronger, removing uncertainty over losing a member and transitioning the economy to face 21st-century challenges. After a decade of instability, everyone in Europe looked to the visions laid out by the new European Commission and European Parliament as a chance for a fresh start.

The drivers for this focus on what the French call “strategic autonomy” – that is, restoring Europe’s independence as an economic, military and political actor – were manifold. Relations between the United States and Western Europe had become increasingly tense since Washington began exerting more pressure on NATO member states to increase their defense spending in 2009 to address the alliance’s growing imbalance. NATO operations in places like Libya highlighted how reliant Europe was on the U.S. for its security. In 2014, at the Wales summit, NATO members agreed to increase their national defense spending to 2 percent of economic output within a decade. But for Western Europe, in the face of an economic crisis that had ballooned into an existential crisis for the EU, and feeling no credible threats to national security, it was difficult for governments to justify placing spending on defense above other priorities.

How a Great Power Falls Apart

By Charles King

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On November 11, 1980, a car filled with writers was making its way along a rain-slick highway to a conference in Madrid. The subject of the meeting was the human rights movement in the Soviet Union, and in the vehicle were some of the movement’s long-suffering activists: Vladimir Borisov and Viktor Fainberg, both of whom had endured horrific abuse in a Leningrad psychiatric hospital; the Tatar artist Gyuzel Makudinova, who had spent years in internal exile in Siberia; and her husband, the writer Andrei Amalrik, who had escaped to Western Europe after periods of arrest, rearrest, and confinement. 

Amalrik was at the wheel. Around 40 miles from the Spanish capital, the car swerved out of its lane and collided with an oncoming truck. Everyone survived except Amalrik, his throat pierced by a piece of metal, probably from the steering column. At the time of his death at the age of 42, Amalrik was certainly not the best-known Soviet dissident. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had published The Gulag Archipelago, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and immigrated to the United States. Andrei Sakharov had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which he was forced to accept in absentia because the Soviet government denied him an exit visa. But in the pantheon of the investigated, the imprisoned, and the exiled, Amalrik occupied a special place. 

Geopolitical Outcomes of the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War

By Oleg Chupryna

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The recent fierce fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia, just the latest in a prolonged conflict, has seemingly have come to an end. This bloody engagement, dubbed the ‘Second Nagorno-Karabakh War,’ lasted six weeks and ended in a truce brokered by Russia, which began on 10 November 2020. Armenia, as the losing side, agreed to return to Azerbaijan most of the territories which it occupied in the early 1990s as the result of the conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh.

The centuries-long dispute between the Armenians and Azerbaijanis over the enclave last re-emerged in the late 1980-s during the final years of the Soviet Union, to which both Azerbaijan and Armenia still belonged. In 1988, Nagorno-Karabakh, which was mainly populated by ethnic Armenians, announced its secession from Azerbaijan and its intention to join Armenia. This led to a bloody war, by the end of which in 1994 Armenia fully occupied Nagorno-Karabakh and some other territories of Azerbaijan beyond the disputed enclave itself. Subsequent 25 year-long peace talks mediated by the United States, France, and Russia under the umbrella of the OSCE have failed to achieve a peace treaty.

The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, apart from being a new phase in an old regional conflict, carries significant geopolitical significance. It manifests the multidimensional nature of the conflict and the complex dynamics governing the interplay of all interested parties, especially Russia and Turkey. As the war is over, at least for now, it is worth examining the primary geopolitical outcomes of the conflict.

Winners and losers in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War

The World Is Becoming More Equal

By Branko Milanovic

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Opponents of economic globalization often point to the ways it has widened inequality within nations in recent decades. In the United States, for instance, wages have remained fairly stagnant since 1980 while the wealthiest Americans have taken home an ever greater share of income. But globalization has had another important effect: it has reduced overall global inequality. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty in recent decades. The world became more equal between the end of the Cold War and the 2008 global financial crisis—a period often referred to as “high globalization.”

The economist Christoph Lakner and I distilled this trend in a diagram released in 2013. The diagram showed per capita income growth rates between 1988 and 2008 across the global distribution of income. (The horizontal axis has the poorest people on the left and the richest on the right.) The graph attracted a lot of attention because it

Should the U.S. Retaliate for Russia’s Big Hack?

By FRED KAPLAN

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The Russian hack of SolarWinds—which affected at least 18,000 of the firm’s customers, including several federal agencies—has revived a long, unsettled debate in national security circles: When Americans are hit with a massive cyberattack, should the U.S. government strike back?

At first glance, the answer seems obvious: Of course, we should strike back—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—or how else will we deter the hackers, and others like them, from striking again?

On reflection, though, the question turns more complicated. Compared with the rest of the world, the United States, in all aspects of its life, is much more thoroughly connected to computer networks. We have the most powerful and precise cyber-rocks to throw at other countries’ windows—but we live in a much glassier house. Therefore, retaliation could spark counterretaliation, and, at each cycle of escalation, we could get hurt more badly than our adversary does.

Biden Has a Long Way to Go to Restore America’s Human Rights Reputation

Frida Ghitis 

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As the world watches the chaotic countdown to a new president in Washington, one anticipated policy shift after Joe Biden’s inauguration is causing anxiety in some quarters and optimism in others: the return of human rights to the global agenda.

Donald Trump’s open disdain for human rights was one of the earliest signs that his presidency would look like no other in the White House. Defending human rights around the world has always required a complicated balancing act, often—though not always—with a tradeoff between American interests and values. Under Trump, values consistently took a back seat. The only time he brought up human rights abuses was when he thought he could extract a personal political benefit, as in the cases of Cuba and Venezuela, whose human rights violations remain a top concern for voters in the key electoral state of Florida.

The approach will change under Biden. The incoming president is sure to disappoint some human rights activists, as have all his predecessors, but he will nonetheless bring a starkly different tone to foreign policy, one in which human rights will be discussed and even championed, both in private and in public.

Among many decisions, Biden will have to choose whether or not to rejoin the controversial United Nations Human Rights Council, a body where much of the membership looks like a who’s who of dictators and the worst human rights violators. The Trump administration withdrew from the council in 2018 after failing to push through standards for membership. That has left it even more exposed to bad actors, with China fortifying its position on the council to protect itself from scrutiny ahead of the expected change in tone from Washington.

Deterrence is America’s Best Response to Russian Cyber Intrusions

by Milton Bearden

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Instead of launching the missiles, we might step back about a half-century to see what a genuine crisis looked and felt like, what it was like when the daggers were actually drawn, and what was done to calm things down.

As an Air Force voice intercept operator in East Asia, I often found myself bored by listening to the chatter on the Chinese Air Force frequencies. To break that boredom, I might spin the dials of my Collins receiver to an open frequency that would remind me, or anyone else listening in, just how dangerous the world was in the early 1960s. On that set frequency one would hear an ominous, yet somehow soothing American voice, a 1960s version of a Morgan Freeman, eerily repeating a message, again and again: 

That transmission was a reminder that about one-third of the intercontinental bombers of Strategic Air Command of the United States Air Force were airborne at any time awaiting orders. The “Sky King” transmissions provided those aircraft with the code that would either keep them in their peaceful orbits or launch them against their targets in the Soviet Union, or China, or North Korea—transportation hubs, power grids, water sources, dams, communications capabilities, the target list goes on.

On the Soviet side, the Long-Range Bomber Force had a smaller, but adequate number of aircraft airborne awaiting their orders to take out targets of “The Main Enemy”—United States. To understand the many issues in the early 1960s that kept the pot boiling you might add the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Berlin Crisis, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. This dangerous combination of events brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the highest levels of alert. A new phrase was coined for this condition by Herman Kahn of the Hudson Institute in 1962:

Facts and opinions about climate change

By Richard C. J. Somerville

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When the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded, climate change science was in its infancy. There were no global climate models, no supercomputers, and no satellite remote-sensing data. Only a few visionaries understood that man-made increases in the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) might cause large global climate changes. The definitive summary of atmospheric science in the decade after World War II was the Compendium of Meteorology, a large multi-authored volume published in 1951 by the American Meteorological Society. Its article on climate change, written by the distinguished British climatologist C. E. P. Brooks, reflects the prevailing expert opinion of that time.

The article began with this statement:

“In the past hundred years the burning of coal has increased the amount of CO2 by a measurable amount (from 0.028 to 0.030 per cent), and Callendar (1939) sees in this an explanation of the recent rise in world temperature. But during the past 7,000 years there have been greater fluctuations of temperature without the intervention of man, and there seems to be no reason to regard the recent rise as more than a coincidence. This theory is not considered further.”

It is important to distinguish between facts and opinions. “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who said that, was a wise and accomplished American politician, sociologist, and diplomat. Like everybody, I know some facts, and I have some opinions. I will first summarize the facts that we have learned from the science of climate change. Then I will give some opinions about what people and governments should do.

How to protect the world from ultra-targeted biological weapons

By Filippa Lentzos

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The potential reach of the state into our individual biology and genetic makeup is expanding at an unprecedented rate. Global responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have crystallized just how quickly and readily machines, algorithms, and computing power can be combined with biological data and used in technologies that subjugate bodies and control populations.

As the Chinese city of Wuhan went into lockdown, the authorities carried out large-scale remote temperature measurements of households in apartment complexes through drones equipped with infrared cameras. Drones were also used to patrol public places, tracking whether people were travelling outside without face masks or violating other quarantine rules. Chinese police forces debuted augmented reality (AR) smart glasses powered by artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, designed to recognize individuals with potential COVID-19 symptoms. The glasses have facial recognition capability to identify and profile individuals in real-time and can also record photos and videos. As Wuhan started to open up again, the authorities introduced “Health Code,” an app people were required to use when entering and exiting residential areas, supermarkets, subways, and taxis, among other spaces. The app stores your personal information, including your ID number, where you live, whether you have been with people carrying the virus, and what symptoms they had. As you touch in or out on entering or exiting, the app gives you a colour: green means you can go anywhere, yellow means you have to quarantine for 7 days, red for 14 days. The app also surreptitiously collects—and shares with the police—your location data.

And this type of surveillance wasn’t used just in China. A range of countries have adopted intrusive and coercive forms of surveillance and use of personal and biological data reminiscent of dystopian novels like Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. As other countries went into lockdown, surveillance cameras with facial recognition tracked quarantine evaders or gauged elevated temperatures of potentially infected individuals in crowds. Fine-grained location data transmitted from mobile phones determined how many people were obeying lockdown orders, fever-detecting cameras screened travellers arriving at airports, and algorithms monitored social media posts for signs of COVID-19’s spread. Contact-tracing apps, centrally storing user interactions, provide “social graphs” of who you have physically met over a period of time. “Immunity passports” or “risk free certificates” combine facial recognition technology with COVID-19 testing and medical records.

Contending with climate change: the next 25 years

By Robert Socolow

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The centennials of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the founding of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists are only 25 years ahead. When I think about the next 25 years, I see the people of this planet wrestling with a reality that has only recently emerged. For the first time in human history, we human beings, doing ordinary things, can alter our entire planet in ways that are harmful to ourselves. And every available strategy to work around these limitations is fraught, so we need to be clever and clearheaded and wary. Fitting on our planet, rather than bursting its seams, is going to be difficult. It will preoccupy many successive generations.

Climate is one of many examples of potential seam-bursting—others include arable land and fisheries—but climate is the one I have thought most about. We are vulnerable to environmental disruption because what makes us distinctly human is finely tuned to a planet that has been quite stable. An apt example is sea level rise. During Earth’s exit from the most recent ice age, from approximately 14,000 to 6,000 years ago, sea level rose 130 meters. But it has changed very little during the past six millennia, with the result that many of the world’s cities have been built at the edge of an unchanging sea. A mere two meters of sea level rise would require extensive changes to these cities and abandonment of some of them.

The largest agent of the climate portion of our newly challenging reality is the carbon dioxide that results when we burn fossil fuels. Because of their high energy density, it is economic to move fossil fuels over global distances by rail and ship and pipeline, enabling global markets. Costs are modest because the best geological sources are highly concentrated: thick seams of coal and expansive reservoirs of oil and natural gas. And the fossil fuels are abundant, in the sense that they could meet the world’s energy needs for centuries (although probably not for millennia).